


something gave you the nerve

by nebulastucky



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: (this isnt a soulmate au), And they were soulmates, Deep Meaningful Conversations, F/M, First Kiss, Getting Together, Love Letters, Sharing a Bed, Slow Dancing, Title from a Taylor Swift Song, oh my god they were soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 09:54:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulastucky/pseuds/nebulastucky
Summary: He looks at her, his smile like a dagger. He puts a hand on the side of her face, and she thinks she might die if she lets herself lean into it. His thumb swipes across her cheek, collecting still-fresh blood from a cut she won there not twenty minutes ago, and she thinks, oh.





	something gave you the nerve

**Author's Note:**

> title from "it's nice to have a friend" by taylor swift

Maka Albarn’s father is not a good man. He is a womaniser, a playboy, a misogynist, a pervert, a cheater, a pig - she’s called him every name in the book. For many, many years, he is her only point of reference for what men are like. 

She decides at a young age, with Spirit as her proof, that men are bastards and not worth her time and energy. And time and time again, she’s proven right. 

And then she enrolls at the Academy, and she meets Soul Evans, and she’s still right.

Soul Evans is arrogant and pretentious and harsh and obsessed with being cool, and Maka should have trusted her gut and just found another weapon to be her partner. 

He says, “This is the kind of person I am,” and she thinks,  _ a pompous creep? _

But then he plays her that song, dark and moody and strange and utterly, utterly intoxicating, and he’s - different, somehow.

It’s like he’s a sculptor, she thinks, that’s the best way to put it. Like every note he plays is another chip off the block of marble, carving out the song inside. 

That’s how she fights, she realises, that’s how she works. One chip at a time. His music is the same as her training, and his soul matches hers.

He shakes her hand when he agrees to be her partner, and something in her comes alive.

-

They shouldn’t work, but they do.

Soul is still careless and too casual and Maka is still serious and stubborn, but they’re both ambitious and driven. For different reasons, maybe, but they have the same means and ends. 

They both have something to prove. A shadow to step out of.

Maka lives every day knowing that her mother was strong enough to turn her father into a Death Scythe. She lives every day knowing her father, a weapon wielded by Death himself, wasn’t strong enough to stay faithful, wasn’t strong enough to show outwardly the love he still claims to have for her mother. 

She lives every day of her life knowing that the most important man in her life carries the worst kind of reputation.

Soul has his family’s music - a legacy, a tapestry he could never quite weave himself into. He tells Maka about it one night, when they sit on the lip of a fountain after just barely scraping through another fight. He tells her about his brother the violinist, his father the flautist, his mother with the voice of an angel.

“You played the piano for me the first day we met,” Maka reminds him, like he’d forget something like that. (She could never. On quiet nights she hears it in her head.)

“I’d never heard anything like it,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper now.

“My timing was off,” he tells her. “And I screwed up a couple notes on the end.”

Part of her wants to know if he remembers those details because of the music or because of her. It’s probably best not to wonder about these things.

“I’m not like them,” Soul says, and he doesn’t sound all that sad. “The music is in my blood, sure, but that’s not who I am.”

“Then who are you?”

He looks at her, his smile like a dagger. He puts a hand on the side of her face, and she thinks she might die if she lets herself lean into it. His thumb swipes across her cheek, collecting still-fresh blood from a cut she won there not twenty minutes ago, and she thinks,  _ oh. _

“We should get going,” he says, “that looks like it needs stitches.”

It’s not an answer, but maybe it is.

-

He drives her crazy, and god, does he know it. He's messy and lazy and one morning she catches him drinking orange juice right from the carton and she nearly kills him. She settles instead for yelling, and lots of it. 

He leaves his things everywhere, like he can’t tell the difference between a communal space and a personal one. A lot of the time it’s food: half-eaten snacks, mostly-empty cups of coffee, candy wrappers. Sometimes it’s socks, or headphones, or his keys, or a phone charger.

Once, just once, Maka finds the shredded remains of a letter in Soul’s handwriting. She can’t make out what it says, only that her name is all over the page. She knows this was never meant for her eyes. 

After that, she stops nagging him about picking up after himself. 

(After that, when he sees the paper in the trash, he stops needing to be nagged.)

After that, every time she sees a stray sock or a sweatshirt thrown in a corner, even if it’s hers or Black Star’s or Patty’s, her first thought is Soul and a letter he never sent. Which makes her first thought one that fills her with a curious warmth, rather than an instant and poisonous rage.

-

Being a weapon takes a lot out of a person. Maka gets that. She understands that a recovery period is necessary - the acrobatics she does to escape injury in every fight they find themselves in has taught her that several times over.

But she will never, ever, understand how Soul can sleep for so long without getting up, even to go to the bathroom. 

Once, after fight that involved three failed Witchhunters and no new kishin egg at the end, he slept for a day and a half straight. Or, at least, she thinks he was asleep. He didn’t leave his room until the second day was nearly over. But sometimes he just sleeps that long anyway, and he doesn’t talk about it.

Maka doesn’t mind. Not as much as she thought she would. Not as much as she used to. 

It used to upset her, the idea that Soul would rather hide himself away than spend time in the land of the living, out in the world, with her. She used to think it was her fault. It felt a lot like when her parents split, and she knew she wasn’t to blame, but she couldn’t help the blanket of guilt and shame that smothered her.

She was alone a lot while they fell apart. In some ways it was better - seeing her mother destroyed made her too sad, and seeing Spirit just made her furious - but that didn’t make it good.

It happens less now that her mother has moved on and she’s come to terms with how she feels about her father, but she still gets hit with spells of loneliness, an aching for closeness that grips her ribcage and squeezes until she can’t breathe.

She tries to explain it to Soul, once, in a moment of weakness. He says he understands. She doesn’t believe him.

“I know you think I don’t get it,” he tells her, and all of his boyishness is gone, “and maybe I don’t. But you have to know I’d do anything to help you. You’re my meister.”

He looks her right in the eye then, and she feels that same sense of  _ different _ she felt when he played her that song, and he takes her hand, and he says, “You’re my partner. It’s my job to understand you.”

Something tells her he doesn’t just mean her soul wavelength.

Soul sleeps a lot, that’s true. But he leaves the door unlocked and an extra pillow beside him.

-

The first time she asks him to teach her to dance, she’s quiet and sheepish about it. He laughs at her, and she almost gets mad, but he says yes. The sad song on the record player has barely started when she trips over her own feet and uses Soul to break her fall.

She asks him again, when his bruises have faded, and he can hear that song without flinching. She doesn’t expect him to, but he says yes, exasperated and laughing a little. She crushes his foot under hers more than once, and she thinks she hears some bones crunch. But she doesn’t fall.

(He does.)

She wants to think she’s getting better by the fourth time they try, but Soul assures her she’s not.

“You might be getting worse,” he jokes, his voice just loud enough for her to hear it over the strains of the music.

“I don’t see how that’s my fault,” she says, “the responsibility of adequate education falls on the educator.”

He pulls her closer and adjusts her top line. “Are you saying I’m a bad teacher?”

She turns to look at him, and her nose bumps his jaw. She feels his hand clam up in hers. “I’m saying I’ve never been a bad student in my life. I have the kindergarten report cards to prove it.”

He laughs, a short burst of air, close enough to her now that she feels her hair move with the expulsion of it.

She steps on his toe then, and he swears, and she apologises, and then it happens again because neither of them moves away. Maka swears this time, and Soul laughs at the absurdity of it. 

His eyes latch onto hers while the music swells around them, and it feels new.

They’re supposed to be waltzing, but the song changes then, and Soul says the timing is wrong for a waltz, but he doesn’t let her go. 

She rests her head on his chest and her hands find each other at the back of his neck, and his arms snake around her waist, and they sway there in the middle of the room for what must be hours but feels like minutes. The sun sets outside and the light that streams through the window paints them golden.

The music now seems strange, so odd to hear something out of time with the beat of Soul’s heart in her ears. It quickens sometimes, if the song changes to something a little bit faster, or something a little bit more obviously romantic. Maka isn’t a fool. She knows how this looks - an afternoon spent pressed together, fading light casting them in a honey-coloured glow that is nothing if not intimate. 

She also knows how it feels.

It feels like she’s been starving for years, and this feeling - of Soul’s nose buried in her hair and his hands strong against her back, holding her against him as if she’d ever think to leave - is the first full meal she’s ever had.

He says her name, barely a whisper, and she could drown in the look he gives her.

She touches his face, tinged pink by a rosy sunset and a blush that trails under his sweater, and he melts into her hand, porcelain and mercury all at once. He moves one hand to cover hers. She feels thunder clap under her skin and fire race through her veins.

“Maka,” he says again. His breath dances across her lips.

“I know,” she says, and draws herself up to meet him. 

They connect, and it feels - it feels like fresh laundry, right from the dryer. It feels like clean sheets after a long day. It feels like the sound of heavy rain on the window. 

It feels like something completely different. It feels like understanding. It feels like a love letter. It feels like being understood. It feels like dancing with your best friend. 

**Author's Note:**

> i couldn't decide on any song for them to actually dance to but i promise the song playing when they kiss is teenage dream glee cover acoustic official (2012) full version. you're welcome
> 
> catch me on twitter @carlyraejervis and on tumblr @macdenlesbian


End file.
